Why this Exception

Why this Exception

1985 4 April 13-14 Why this Exception (472) A French acquaintance of mine, a M. Gilles Guilbert, by taste, nature and profession a musician, used often to assert, (to our amusement) regardless of where he was, that the only true criterion of the culture and civilization of a people was the standard of its love for music.

Somehow, he heard a Muslim Qari reciting the Holy Qur’an one day, and was at once enchanted by it. It was music to him, and so powerful that wherever he went he wanted to hear the Qur’an recited. When in Paris, he used to go on Fridays to the Turkish mosque. And he was so much more impressed when he was told that it was not a poem but prose. He began meditating: poems in each and every language are melodious, and could be measured and scanned, but nowhere could this be done with prose. Why an exception in Arabic? Then he learned Arabic script, and began reading the Qur’an himself. He bought a pocket size copy of the sacred text, and carried it with him always. He even began learning the smaller Suras by heart. At last, he decided to take the plunge and became Abdullah Guilbert.

I met him for the first time in Istanbul, some twenty years ago, and there he explained to me his theory or discovery, viz:, poems can be scanned and measured with mathematical precision in any language, but not prose works, be that a classical or modern language; the only exception in Arabic; and in Arabic, only the Qur’an. So the Qur’an cannot be of human origin: surely it is the revealed word of God himself, for its verses can be scanned like the syllables of a poetical hemistich, so much so that even if a single letter of a verse of the Qur’an is omitted, it can be detected immediately on “hearing it.”

I was impressed, but not being a musician myself, I was not much interested. One day he came to see me in the university, very nervous, agitated, perplexed and trembling. He said to me; “Surely our Muslim ancestors have somehow lost some passages of the Qur’an.” Then he explained; “In the Sura 110 (Al-Nasr) they read and write ‘afwaajaa Fasabbih’ and that is, musically speaking, impossible.” My humble knowledge of tajweed (psalmody of the Qur’an) came to my help, and I said; “No, that is not the only right way of reading it. One may also pronounce it ‘afwaajan fassabih’. The sound of letter N in ‘afwaajan’ may then be pronounced in full as ‘afwaajan’ instead of ‘afwaaj’. This may then be followed by the second word, ‘fassabbih’.”

Thereupon, he recovered as if from a trance, and said. “Oh, if that is so, then it is all right, nothing is lacking and I can renew my faith.”

Article curtsy: Dr. Muhammad Hamidullah